These days I've been working rather a lot more than I'd really prefer to, and been dealing with rather a lot more stress than I might be wanting, so I haven't been sleeping well.

When I do sleep well, I rarely remember my dreams, and those I do remember are fairly prosaic, like trying to catch the bus and then realizing as I'm running down the street that I'm in my underwear, that sort of thing.

When I'm stressed and sleeping poorly, on the other hand...

When I'm stressed and sleeping poorly, my dreams are vivid, complex, and bizarre. Like the one last night, which involved Jenna Jameson, my sweetie joreth, lolitasir, an unsecured fiber optic junction box, a BDSM convention, two other unnamed porn stars, a set of railroad tracks, a disposable Bic pen, a laser pointer, a fishing tackle box full of needles, Walgreen's drug store, and group sex.

And to be quite honest, I don't even really know who Jenna Jameson is, other than she either does or did at one time do porn. I didn't even know what she looks like 'til I Googled her just now. Apparently, that's her there on the left.

As far as my subconscious mind is concerned, she's a computer hacker with mad leet skillz.

But maybe I should back up a little.

The dream started simply enough--joreth and I driving together to a BDSM convention. The thing about dreams is that the laws of physical reality don't apply; within the dream world, I can become other characters, ignore laws of physics, change my shape, become invisible, fly through a tie-dyed sky, all manner of things.

Some things are universal constants, inviolate even in the realm of dreams. One of those is that I have a lousy sense of direction.

So naturally we got lost on the way to the convention--so lost that at one point I decided the only way to find the hotel was to drive along the train tracks to get there. There was, you see, a train station right in front of the place--and happily, we arrived at the same time the train did. I parked behind the train, it disgorged a carload of porn stars and the computer hacker Ms. Jameson, and we went inside...

...to discover the hotel was sold out.

But no matter! The porn stars and Ms. Jameson invited us to stay in their room.

We followed them up to the room, and it wasn't long until folks started losing clothing. By "folks" I mean "joreth", of course, who soon became the centerpiece of a game of "Let's See How Aroused We Can Get Her Without Letting Her Get Off."

This is a fun game, by the way, and one I highly recommend in real life. It's nearly as much fun as the game "Let's See How Long We Can Keep Her On The Edge of Orgasm Before We Send Her Home," which record is still held by my old sweetie Michelle, at six hours and thirty-seven minutes, but I digress.

Anyway, the game of "Let's See How Aroused We Can Get Her Without Letting Her Get Off" started simply enough, with the forcible of removal of clothing and various nibbles, licks, fondles, sucks, and that sort of thing, until one of the unnamed porn stars said "I know! Needles!" and opened a sex toy box rather resembling a gigantic fishing tackle box, with all those little trays and things, only full of sex toys.

And needles.

And then someone else said that the Walgreen's drug store across the street was having a sale on over-the-counter liquid libido enhancing drugs (buy five vials, get two free, or something like that), and wouldn't the game be more fun if we coated the needles with aphrodisiac drugs first?

Needless to say, it wasn't long before joreth was In A State, and squirming and begging to be fucked, which was kind of fun.

Meanwhile, Ms. Jameson had discovered that there was a large ISP about three miles away that offered fiber-optic connectivity to businesses. She also somehow discovered that many of the fiber-optic trunks traveled around the outside of the building, and that there was a cover missing from a critical junction box, and that if she fired a laser into the junction box she could write any data she liked into it.

So she used a laser pointer and some scrounged components to build an interface and hardware encoder/decoder that would let her take a video camera and send out an encoded signal using the laser pointer. A normal laser pointer can't really reach three miles, so she used a disposable pen to make a laser collimator to tighten the output of the laser pointer so it'd be able to hit the junction box...simple, really, right?

Next morning, joreth is still climbing the walls with arousal, and lolitasir is giving a workshop on group sex. It wasn't too difficult to persuade joreth to be the demo bunny for the gang-bang part of the workshop, her being in her altered state and all, so next thing you know I and a few other random guys are all making the three-horned goat with her at the same time.

Ms. Jameson, having previously hooked up her camcorder to the device she'd constructed from pens and other hotel junk, was circling around filming us like mad, and sending the signal via the laser pointer to the fiber-optic trunk three miles down the road. She'd previously taken the liberty, you see, of penetrating the computers within the building, which were primarily used for the purpose of streaming conference calls and various tutorials on office productivity apps like Word and PowerPoint.

The upshot of all of this is that, all across the country, that very morning, thousands of businessmen and executives in hundreds of Fortune 500 companies logged on to their network expecting to see a presentation on how to create dynamic, exciting PowerPoint slides, or to have a conference with their superiors in New York City, but instead were treated to a very kinky gang-bang featuring the lovely joreth, with lolitasir talking about the finer points of multiple penetration and the angles guaranteed to get the best results and such.

I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. I'm told that through the interpretation of one's dreams, the true nature of one's subconscious mind can become known, but I'm not sure that's not a load of bunk.

I think it's pretty easy to figure out what it means. You get off on needles and smart women, I've told you that I have a thing for gang-bangs and I have an aversion to being filmed/video taped, and you have a *very* strong thing for anything that pushes my buttons :-) and we very recently attended both a fetish convention as well as a convention with a train station next to it. Plus, you just sat in on lolitasir's panel, something you've indicated several times that you heartily enjoy.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I'm not a big fan of the "deeper meaning" of dreams. Usually they're pretty easy to figure out if they have any meaning at all (remember, I actually studied this back in my psych major days), because they take the things that are on the person's mind at the time. Sometimes the "meaning" comes from the random image flashes that happens during REM sleep and the brain slaps an overlay of "meaning" onto those random flashes the way we like to see Jesus in grains of wood or "fate" in coincidences.